Quotes About Healing

The banished emotions reassert themselves and invade the body.

To escape this vicious cycle we must face the truth. And we can do it. We were humiliated children; we were the victims of our parents' ignorance, the victims of their history, of the unconscious scars with which childhood left them. We had no choice but to deny the truth.

The reason why parents mistreat their children has less to do with character and temperament than with the fact that they too were mistreated and were not permitted to defend themselves.

I want to live my own life, to be at peace and not to think all the time about how they hit me and humiliated me and almost tortured me.

they ward off any kind of accusation from the parents who once maltreated them so severely. They do not know what that treatment has done to them, they do not know how much they have suffered from it. Above all, they do not want to know. They see it as something beneficial, something inflicted on them for their own good. Self-therapy

The once-beaten children still living inside adults often fear being punished if they dare to truly SEE, without illusions, what their parents did to them in their first years of life. Once they understand that this danger no longer exists, they can liberate their life.

And yet the truth is so essential that its loss exacts a heavy toll, in the form of grave illness.

Experience has taught me that my own body is the source of all the vital information that has enabled me to achieve greater autonomy and self-confidence. Only when I allowed myself to feel the emotions pent up for so long inside me did I start extricating myself from my own past.

But that can only be possible when mothers and fathers no longer unconsciously assume that their children have been brought into the world to alleviate the frustrations and repair the damage they have suffered in their own lives.

If I as a helpless child was abused and am not allowed to see this, I will abuse other helpless creatures without realizing what I am doing. I will also refuse to read books on abuse, or I won't want to understand them because, if I did, I would have to feel the tragedy of my childhood and the pain of having been misled at such an early age.

True adulthood would mean no longer denying the truth. It would mean feeling the repressed suffering, consciously acknowledging the story remembered by the body at an emotional level, and integrating that story instead of repressing it.

This is an astounding statement, because I know of literally no one who suffers from psychic symptoms and seeks treatment for them without having at least been beaten and humiliated in childhood.

The life-saving function of repression in childhood is transformed in adulthood into a life-destroying force.

Once the adult self has decided to find out the whole truth about itself, the body feels understood, respected, and protected.

Consciously experiencing our legitimate emotions is liberating, not just because of the discharge of long-held tensions in the body but above all because it opens our eyes to reality (both past and present) and frees us of lies and illusions

As the sociologist Lucien Lombardo wrote in his introduction to a chapter of my recent book, The Truth Will Set You Free, "childhood is not the shortest age in our life but rather the longest because it stays with us until our death.

Six years after I began to paint I wrote my first three books in three years (The Drama of the Gifted Child, For Your Own Good, and Thou Shalt Not Be Aware), in which I tried to explain the connections between denied suffering in childhood and adult violence.

Today, I believe that to mistreat children as I was mistreated—to punish them, to forbid them to weep, to speak, to defend themselves, to revolt against brutal treatment—is the greatest crime that there is. It is a crime to discipline children so much that they become blind, dumb, lifeless and then, later, to deny the whole thing. No wonder such children would later as doctors rather subject others to electroshock treatment than confront the repressed misery of their past.

Throughout their later life, these people will have to deal with situations in which these rudimentary feelings may awaken, but without the original connection ever becoming clear. The connection can be deciphered only when the intense emotions have been experienced in therapy and successfully linked with their original situation.*

No, we need precisely the opposite: a partial companion, someone who can share with us the horror and indignation that is bound to arise when our emotions gradually reveal to her, and to us, how the little child suffered, what it went through all alone when body and soul were fighting for years on end to preserve a life threatened by constant danger.

Accordingly, I believe that preaching forgiveness is not only hypocritical and futile but also actively dangerous. It masks the compulsion to repeat.

Frequently, parents withhold such communication from the child, not because they are in any way malevolent but because they themselves never experienced such a token of affection in childhood and consequently do not know that such a thing exists. They can learn to communicate meaningfully with their children, but only if those children have the full support of a therapist who has shaken off the influence of poisonous pedagogy and is totally and unreservedly on the children's side.

But a person who is no longer a child and has the courage to mature by wanting to see the truth must be capable of clearly and unequivocally rejecting the cruelty he or she suffered. Only then will he or she refuse to contribute to the success of evil.

To free themselves of this compulsion they need to be able to share their feelings with someone—they need the experience of being listened to, understood, taken seriously, of no longer having to hide. Only then will they know that this is the nourishment they have been searching for all their lives.